99Percent

Tribexian Vir: I disagree with you 100%. The death penalty works, only if done correctly. If a man is to be caught stealing, killing, drinking alcohol, etc., he should be instantly shot in the head by an elite police officer. There'd doubtless be far less crime.

"Elite police officer"? sounds more like the Taliban.

daemon

Dude, you are so right--Judge Dredd was such an awesome comic book!

tronvillain

As far as I know, it still is. Of course, we're obviously not talking about the short lived DC series, though that wasn't too bad either.

tronvillain

Hey, didn't you say you didn't read comics TV?

emphryio

I believe in worse than the death penalty for people that are more certainly guilty than our justice system currently recognizes.

These criminals absolutely should be used for experimental testing and then be dissected.

For intance, for the last 15 years nobody has been sure how useful rat lung overload particle deposition experiments correlate to humans.

What a waste just to "humanely" kill these people. Stick them in inhalation chambers, where they may contribute to science in saving lives.

bonduca

How can you be certain that even one of them has not been unjustly convicted?

[ June 07, 2002: Message edited by: bonduca ]</p>

Choy Lee Mu

The death penalty is society's response to an unfavorable gene sequence. Culling of animals who posess undesirable traits is common practice. We as humans think of ourselves (untruly) as more than an animal, but the end result is exactly the same. We execute obviously (read: "mortally criminal") people to keep the gene pool that we pass on from becoming polluted.

We may not call it such, but the result is the same.

The agreements we make with each other (law, morality, society, politics) may seem intellectual and high-minded to us collectively, but they all serve the same purpose: survival. It literally does not matter what we think they mean. . . evolution wins out on a much more basic level no matter how we describe it's results.

-Choy Lee Mu

tronvillain

Oh please. First, genetic determinism about behavior on that level is unjustified. Why don't you just hunt down the children and relatives of anyone on death row while you're at it?. Second, life imprisonment would amount to the same thing with less cost and less risk.

Choy Lee Mu

Your statement about children was sensationalistic and completely irrelevant.

Did you catch that last part of my post?

It does not matter what you think, or I think, or how we describe it, or whether there's "less cost and less risk", or whether we execute all of our criminals and their families, or none of them. It happens whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Our species is in a fight for it's life. It will either survive, or it won't. It survives by succesfully playing the evolution game across millenia and eons. It literally does not matter that you do not subscribe to it, and I do.

My opinion on the matter is just that. Obviously, morality, ethics, and societal values play a much more immediate role in our short lives -- sometimes so immediate that we never take the long view. I don't much myself, except when I think about the death penalty and abortion. Those two issues never seem to resolve themselves in my head without resorting to a very long view indeed. The short-term situational laws and ethics that we use to try to resolve these two issues never seem to get the job done, in my opinion.

Ah, well.

-Choy Lee Mu

Baptist Vine

I don't trust people to administer the dealth penalty.

I am not morally against the death penalty itself in certain cases, ie putting to death serial killers for instance. My problem is with a moral administration of the dealth penalty. I read about too many wrongful convictions to trust that people will responsibly administer the dealth penalty. Even one wrongful conviction is a million too many in my view. I can think of cases where a wrongful conviction occurred, and an innocent person would have been killed had a dealth penalty been in effect.

The excuses for wrongful convictions goes something like, 'oh well, mistakes are sometimes made...'. But, in my view at least, when the evidence is looked at in wrongful conviction cases, it can be seen, and that fairly clearly I think, that an objective evaluation of the evidence correctly established innocence, but owing to public pressure to solve cases that are admittedly horrific, or owing to investigators mishandling evidence to suit a priort assumptions of guilt based upon 'gut feelings', a wrongful conviction results. It's not really a mistake, it's much more akin to negligence or a criminal mishandling of a public duty to investigate.

I haven't seen suitable levels or committments to objetivity in evaluating evidence to warrant entrusting a state with a dealth penalty.